A stimulating article in the Spring 2014 issue of Litigation (the Journal of the American Bar Association’s Section of Litigation) posed an interesting question: “Does client confidentiality live forever?”1 What if the client dies? What if that death occurred 100 years ago? Rather provocatively, the authors set up their discussion by referring to Lizzie Borden, tried and acquitted of the 1892 murder in Massachusetts of her father and stepmother. The case inspired a rhyme:
Lizzy Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty one.
